Avril Lavigne Recalls Making 2002’s ‘Let Go’ as a Teenager: ‘I Didn’t Even Know What Hollywood Was’

“I was getting out of high school and I just wanted to rock out,” Lavigne told The Guardian in a new interview

Avril Lavigne. PHOTO: ROBERT MORA/GETTY

Avril Lavigne is reminiscing on her early days as a musician — back when things were less “Complicated.”

In a new interview with The Guardian, Lavigne spoke about creating 2002’s Let Go — which spawned the hits “Complicated,” “Sk8er Boi,” and “I’m with You” — as a teenager fresh out of her parents’ small town Canada home.

“I was getting out of high school and I just wanted to rock out,” said the 37-year-old punk-edged pop star. “I want loud guitars, I want live drums … I want to write about the crazy stuff, the insane emotions, the good and the bad.”

Ahead of the album’s creation, Lavigne had been performing country music and once performed onstage with fellow Canadian musician Shania Twain after winning a contest at 16. After getting signed to Arista Records and moving to California later that year to begin working on Let Go, the then-teenager soon found herself navigating new situations in the music industry.

“I didn’t even know what Hollywood was or what record deals were,” recalled Lavigne, who was placed in studios with many producers and co-writers she’d never met before and was expected to create authentic music. But due to her age and newcomer status, she often wasn’t taken seriously.

“They didn’t care what I had to say,” she told the outlet. “They had their own style and didn’t bother to look at me and try to let me lead.”

“I was very clear on what I wanted to do and what I didn’t want to do. I wanted to be angsty and to sound more like a band,” Lavigne — whose seventh album Love Sux dropped earlier this year — said of her artistry at the time. “I didn’t want to be all bubblegum pop. I wanted to turn my emotions into lyrics. I was honestly just very, very pure.”

She’d later meet Lauren Christy, Graham Edwards and Scott Spock of pop writing and production group The Matrix, who’d previously worked with Christina Aguilera, and create five of Let Go‘s 13 tracks together — including “Complicated.”

“I didn’t know what hits were, but my body and my intuition knew that this was a hit song,” Lavigne remembers of creating her breakthrough international hit song. “I was like: ‘This is f—ing cool, this sounds cool to me.'”

Looking back on the album, which will be rereleased later this year in honor of its 20th anniversary, Lavigne now sees it as a time capsule of her life as a teenager breaking into the industry.

“I wrote this album right when I got out of high school and now I get to hear these lyrics of me talking about my small town and my obsession with skater boys,” she said. “Even things like in ‘My World,’ I literally talk about the fact that I got fired by a ‘fried chicken ass’ I worked for at a fried chicken chain.”

“It’s hilarious,” she continued. “I look back at those lyrics, and I’m like: ‘I can’t believe I said that in a song.'”

Overall, Lavigne considers the album’s creative process a “special” time in her life.

“I moved out of my parents’ house and directly into a tour bus, not having any rules,” she said. “I was like: ‘I can drink beer now and eat pizza every day’ and I just got to hang out with my band and travel the world. It was crazy, but it was pretty special.”

Avril Lavigne and Olivia Rodrigo. MATT WINKELMEYER/GETTY

Elsewhere in the interview, she spoke about her music’s influence on today’s punk-tinged pop stars like Billie Eilish, WILLOW, and Olivia Rodrigo.

“That younger generations are discovering my stuff and that Billie, Olivia, and Willow [Smith] go out into the world and continue to shatter the mould like I did 20 years ago is super-inspiring,” she explained. “All these people around me are like: ‘Oh my God, I’m a huge fan, I listened to you growing up, you inspired me!’ It’s really trippy.”